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I previously wrote about my experience handing out How To Vote (HTV) cards at the federal election a couple of weeks ago [1].
One comment noted that at one polling place “all the volunteers for different candidates had combined into a single team, handing out all the cards together“, which makes sense. There is some advantage in forcing cards on people, some people decide who to vote for once they are inside the polling booth based on information on the HTV cards (a couple of voters stated an intention to do so which disappointed the politically aware people who hand out the HTV cards). But for most voters there is no benefit in competing to hand them a HTV card.
Some of the comments expressed a dislike of being subjected to people handing out HTV cards. As a voter I don’t particularly like having a group of conflicting people wanting to hand me a HTV card either. Also it is obviously a waste of resources to hand out so much cardboard that goes to waste (particularly the Liberal and Labor parties that use glossy non-recycled paper).
I think that the ideal solution would be to have the officials at the polling booths hand out HTV cards on request. A voter would have to specifically request the card from a party and the poll officials would not be able to offer them a selection, “sorry I can’t tell you who is running for election, but if you express a desire to vote for a particular party I can give you a card instructing you how to do so“. The parties would be responsible for providing the HTV cards (according to strict specifications regarding the acceptable sizes), and if the supply runs out then the officials would decline requests.
This could even be made self-financing by making the parties who want their cards distributed pay for a fraction of the wages of the people who hand out the cards, if each polling place had one person handing out the HTV cards at a salary of $500 for the day and there were 5 parties cards to hand out then each party would have to pay $100. The reduced print runs for HTV cards would probably save each party more than $100.
Something like this should satisfy the real need of voters who want advice on how to support their preferred party while not annoying the voters who know how to vote without any assistance. I expect that most members of the parties would be in favor of this idea. The only reason we go to the significant amount of effort and expense to hand out the HTV cards is because everyone else is doing so.
Shereen El Feki gave an inspiring TED talk about Islamic youth culture [1]. She shows some interesting exerpts from the 4SHBAB TV network which is known as “Islamic MTV“, the music video from the US was of particularly high quality – while I expect high quality videos to be made in the US I don’t generally expect quality Islamic videos from the US (or anywhere else really). She also notes that the videos show a “kinder gentler face of Islam“.
She contrasts that with a clip by Haifa Wehbe [2] – a Lebanese pop star who appears to have a lot in common with Britney Spears (Shereen describes her as a “pan-Arab pinup-girl”).
She cites the comic “The 99” which has Islamic super-heros who represent the 99 attributes of Allah. One thing that I found very interesting was that the 99 character Jemi is shown using what is obviously an OLPC.
This seems to indicate some very positive trends for the interaction of Islamic culture with the European and American culture which is Christian and Atheist dominated.
Kavita Ramdas gave an interesting TED talk about radical women embracing tradition [3]. She highlights a woman who teaches girls to read in Afghanistan based on the religious edict that every Muslim should read the Koran and a Croatian Lesbian choir that sings traditional folk songs.
Naif al-Mutawa gave an interesting TED talk about the creation of “The 99” [4]. He starts by comparing some of the characters in the Justice League of America to Christian traditions and then describes the back story behind his Islamic super-heroes. His major aim is to provide positive role models for Muslim children.
Apparently a cross-over production involving characters from The 99 and the Justice League of America is being developed at the moment – Wonder Woman wears clothing that is less revealing than usual though. It’s worth noting that Naif is a practicing psychologist who’s clients include victims of political torture, so he seems to have some insight into the problems that most people will never have.
Urban Honking has an insightful article about the Arduino and suggests that it is one of the most important factors for the development of the computer industry in the near future [1]. It compares the Arduino to the Altair.
Wired has an interesting article about a company that provides a satellite kit and a launch into low Earth orbit for $8000 [2]. Arduino in space?
Linux Journal has an interesting article by David Rowe about the “Mesh Potato” which is a Wifi mesh router that also runs VOIP [3]. One particularly interesting aspect of this article is the explanation of the way they designed and tested it.
Susan Shaw gave an informative TED talk about the toxic effects of the attempts to clean up the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico [4]. It seems that trying to disperse the oil just makes it worse, and the chemical companies are refusing to disclose the chemicals that are being used.
The New York Times has an interesting article by David Leonhardt about the value of pre-school teachers [5]. Some research on the difference that good teachers can make in economic terms suggests that the make an economic difference to the children to the value of $320,000 per annum (IE a class of 16 children who were taught for a year would on average each receive a benefit of $20,000 over their lifetime). Also there are social benefits which aren’t counted by that study. While I can’t imagine pre-school teachers getting paid $320,000 any time soon, it does seem obvious that good teachers deserve significantly better pay. Of course one problem is how to determine which teachers are good, better test results are not a reliable indication.
Paul Krugman describes America as being “on the unlit, unpaved road to nowhere” due to the policies of saving money by cutting funding for schools, street-lights, and roads [6].
The Chive has an amusing post about how to quit a bad job [7]. It would be good if someone really did this, I’m sure that there are enough creative people who don’t like their job.
Hell Pizza in New Zealand published a zombie themed choose your own adventure on Youtube [8]. Unfortunately the options to choose the next segment don’t work on HTML5 with Chromium so if you don’t have flash you miss out.
AskThePilot.com has an informative essay about airline security written by a commercial pilot [9]. The anecdote about the pilot not being allowed to take the type of knife that is issued to first and business class passengers is rather amusing.
FredOnEverything.net has an interesting analysis of Wikileaks and why the Pentagon and Fox News hate it [10]. Fred is a very skillful writer, while he’s not the first person to say some of these things he may have said it best.
The Wikipedia page on Borosilicate glass (which is best known under the trademark Pyrex) is really interesting [11]. Borsilicate glass was formerly known as “Duran” and it’s main characteristic that makes it suitable for lab use is resistance to Thermal Shock, but it’s also harder and has a higher melting point. Apparently you can get Pyrex drinking glasses, I want some!
Eben Moglen gave an interesting talk “Freedom in the Cloud” about the development of free servers to manage personal data and replace Facebook etc (among many other things) [12]. The Debian Wiki has an articla about designing such a system [13].
The APNIC published an interesting paper on IPv4 background radiation [14]. Apparently some /24’s receive so much random traffic (from broken applications and viruses) that they can’t be delegated. IPv6 will solve this problem by making it infeasible to scan all IP addresses. Also it’s interesting to note the excessive amounts of traffic to 1.0.168.192 which is from applications too broken to correctly send data to 192.168.0.1 which have been installed by sysadmins who are too incompetent to watch what is being sent out of their network.
There is apparently some MS-Windows software for navigating light aircraft in Australia. It takes input from a GPS device and knows the rules for certain types of common tasks (such as which direction to use when approaching an airport). My first question when I heard of this was “so if the Windows laptop crashes does your plane crash?“. But I’ve been assured that paper maps will always be available.
The requirement is for a touch-screen device because a regular laptop in the open position won’t leave enough room for the control stick. So the question is, what is the best touch-screen Windows laptop? It must be relatively rugged spinning media for storage is unacceptable due to the risk of damage in turbulence, it should be relatively cheap (less than $1000), and can apparently have a somewhat low resolution for the screen.
The pilot who asked me for advice on this matter is currently thinking of the ASUS Eee T91 which runs Windows XP home, has 16G of solid-state storage and a 1024*600 screen. I am concerned about the reliability of that system as the rotatable screen design seems inherently weak.
The Smartbook concept sounds appealing, I don’t expect that you would want to wait for a typical OS to boot while flying a plane. But those devices mostly use ARM CPUs and thus can’t run MS-Windows. One particularly interesting device is the Always Innovating Touchbook [1] which has a detachable keyboard – which would be handy for non-airline use. Unfortunately it seems that Always Innovating aren’t doing production at the moment, they say “The current Touch Book production is in stand-by and will resume in the summer when we will release our newest and craziest innovation” – well summer is almost over in the northern hemisphere so I guess that means there won’t be anything from them for another 9 months.
A device such as an iPad would also be a good option for looking at static documents. The pilot is considering using a MS-Windows PC to generate images and then viewing them on such a device. But he’s not really enthusiastic about it.
Are there any good and cheap touch-screen devices that run MS-Windows? Are there any particularly noteworthy PDF reader devices which would be better than an iPad for viewing maps while flying a plane? Is it possible to run a MS-Windows application that uses a GPS under Wine on a Netbook?
Yesterday I handed out how to vote (HTV) cards for the Australian Greens. The experience was very different to the one I had when I handed out cards for the Greens in the Victorian state election in 2006 [1]. The Labor party (ALP) hadn’t spread any gross lies about the Greens and there were no representatives from the insane parties (Family First and Citizens Electoral Council/Commission (CEC)). So we didn’t have any arguments among the people handing out the HTV cards.
The atmosphere among the volunteers that were present was a good match for some ideals of a sporting contest. Everyone wanted their own team to win but acted in a sporting manner. When no voters were around we had some friendly conversations.
One thing that was interesting to note was the significant number of families where the parents in their 40s deliberately snubbed me while their children in the 18-22 age range took the Greens cards. It seemed that for families with adult children there were two likely voting patterns, one was children voting Green and parents not liking it, and the other was when the entire family voted informal (when someone refuses all offers of HTV cards it’s a safe bet that they will cast an informal vote). In Australia submitting a vote card is mandatory but making it legible and formal is optional.
The last report I heard suggested that about 5% of the total votes were informal. This seems to be strong evidence showing that civics lessons are needed in high school. Also there were a disturbing number of people who stated that they didn’t know which party to vote for when they were collecting the HTV cards. A HTV card has one or two sentences about the party and there are almost no requirements for truth in such statements. Anyone who votes according to such brief summaries of the parties is quiet unlikely to end up casting a vote that gives the result that they desire.
The result of the election is a significant swing to the Greens, more senators and the first Green MP! For the lower house it seems that Labor will have great difficulty in forming government even when in a coalition with the Greens and some independents. It seems unlikely that the Liberal party could ever make a deal with the Greens, the Liberal position on almost every significant issue contradicts that of the Green policy, but there is a chance of a Liberal coalition with independent MPs. In any case it seems that the Greens will have the balance of power in the senate so the excesses of the Howard government can’t be repeated.
If you like the nail-biting drama of watching several columns of figures slowly changing over the course of several days then you would love watching the analysis of this election! Whatever coalition government is created is not likely to be stable and we can probably expect another election in a year or two.
Linux People and Voting
Chris Samuel (a member of LUV who’s known for his work on high performance computers and the “vacation” program) has described why he’s voting for the Greens [1]. His main reasons are the Greens strong support of human rights and for science-based policy.
Paul Dwerryhouse (a member of the Australian Linux community who’s currently travelling around the world and who has made contributions to a range of Linux projects including SE Linux) has described his thoughts about the “Filter Conroy” campaign [2]. He gives a list of some of the high profile awful candidates who could possibly win a seat and therefore deserve a lower position in the preferences than Conroy.
SAGE-AU and Voting for the Internet
There has been some discussion by members of the System Administrators Guild of Australia (SAGE-AU) [3] about issues related to the election. As you would expect there was no consensus on which party was best. But there was a general agreement that the Greens are the only significant party to strongly support the NBN (National Broadband Network – fiber to the home in cities and fast wireless in rural areas) and to also strongly oppose censoring the Internet. SAGE-AU has an official position opposing Internet filtering, and while the organisation hasn’t taken a position on the NBN it seems that the majority of members are in favor of it (I am in a small minority that doesn’t like the NBN). So it seems that political desires of the SAGE-AU members (and probably most people who care about the Internet in Australia) are best represented by the Greens.
Note that SAGE-AU has no official policy on this, the above paragraph is based on discussions I’ve had on mailing lists and in private mail with a number of SAGE-AU members. Also note that not all the SAGE-AU members who agree that the Greens advocate their positions on Internet issues plan to vote for them.
The Green support for the NBN is based on the importance of the Internet to all aspects of modern life, the social justice benefit of providing decent net access for everyone (particularly people in rural areas) is very important to the Greens. I still oppose the NBN and believe that it would be better to just provide better ADSL in all suburbs, better net access (through whichever technology works best) in rural areas, and fiber to the central business areas. But the NBN isn’t really that important to me, human rights and a science based policy are much more important and are the reasons why I’ve been supporting and voting for the Greens.
No Wasted Votes
One thing to note is that the Australian electoral system is designed to avoid wasted votes. There are two ways of considering a vote to be wasted in Australia, one is if you live in an electorate where both the upper and lower house elections have an almost certain result such that no expected swing can change the outcome – I doubt that this is possible for any region in Australia given the way the upper house elections work, although a large portion of the lower house seats have a result that is almost certain.
The other way of having a wasted vote is to vote for someone who doesn’t actually represent you. Lots of people mindlessly vote for a party that seems to represent them, either they identify with unions and vote Labor every time, they regard themselves as “conservative” and vote Liberal every time, or they live in a rural area and vote National every time. The Labor and Liberal parties don’t differ much in policies and members in safe seats typically don’t do anything for the people who elected them. If you generally support the policies of one of the major parties then it can be a good tactic to give your first preference to a minor party. For example if you tend towards Labor then vote Greens first and preference Labor over Liberal. The result will be that your vote will count towards Labor in the lower house and it sends a message to Labor and prevents them from being complacent.
Before Australian elections there is always some propaganda going around about wasted votes, this is usually part of a deliberate campaign to try and prevent people from voting for smaller parties. Because the news has many mentions of wasted votes in US elections (which are watched closely in Australia) it seems that some Australians don’t realise that there are significant and fundamental differences between the political systems in Australia and the US.
Volunteering
Last time I checked the Greens were still accepting volunteers to hand out “how to vote” cards, so if you want to do more for the Greens than just vote for them then this is one way to do it. If you want an uncensored Internet with freedom of speech and a lot of investment in infrastructure (as well as good support for all human rights) then you really want to help the Greens win more seats at the election on Saturday.
I have just read The Gift of Fear and Other Survival Signals that Protect Us From Violence by Gavin de Becker.
Like many self-help books it has a concept that can be described in a paragraph and explained in a few pages. The rest of the book shares anecdotes that help the reader understand the concept, but which are also interesting for people who get it from the first chapter. When I read the book I considered the majority of the content to be interesting stuff added to pad it out to book size because the concept seemed easy enough to get from the start, but from reading some of the reviews I get the impression that 375 pages of supporting material aren’t enough to convince some people – maybe this is something that you will either understand from the first few chapters or never understand at all.
Gavin’s writing is captivating, he has written a book about real violent crime in a style that is more readable than many detective novels, from the moment I finished the first chapter I spent all my spare time reading it.
I was a little disappointed at the lack of detailed statistics, but when someone has done all the statistical analysis chooses to provide the results in the form of anecdotes rather than statistics I’m prepared to tolerate that – especially when the anecdotes are so interesting. I spent quite a bit of time reading the Wikipedia pages relating to some of the people and incidents that are mentioned in this book.
The basic concepts of his book are to cease worrying about silly things like airline terrorists (passengers won’t surrender now so that’s not going to work again) and to instead take note of any real fear. For example if you are doing the same things you usually do but suddenly feel afraid then you should carefully consider what you might have subconsciously noticed that makes you feel afraid and what you can do about it. This isn’t going to change my behavior much as I have mostly been doing what the book recommends for a long time.
I think that everyone should read this book.
As far as I recall the standard for naming Linux Ethernet devices has always been ethX where X is a number starting at 0. Until fairly recently the interface names were based on the order that device drivers were loaded or the order in which the PCI bus was scanned. This meant that after hardware changes (replacing network cards or changing the BIOS settings related to the PCI bus) it was often necessary to replace Ethernet cables or change the Linux network configuration to match the renumbering. It was also possible for a hardware failure to cause an Ethernet card to fail to be recognised on boot and thus change the numbers of all the others!
In recent times udev has managed the interface naming. In Debian the file /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules can be edited to change the names of interfaces, so no matter the scanning order as long as an interface retains it’s MAC address it will get the correct name – or at least the name it initially had. One of the down-sides to the way this operates is that if you remove an old Ethernet card and replace it with a new one then you might find that eth1 is your first interface and there is no eth0 on the system – this is annoying for many humans but computers work quite well with that type of configuration.
I’ve just renamed the interfaces on one of my routers by editing the /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules file and rebooting (really we should have a utility like /sbin/ip with the ability to change this on a running system).
I have decided to name the Ethernet port on the motherboard mb0. The PCI slots are named A, B, and C with A being the bottom one and when there are two ports on a PCI card the one closest to the left side of the system (when viewed from the front – the right side when viewed from the read) is port 0 on that card. So I have interfaces pcia0, pcia1, pcib0, pcib1, and pcic0. Now when I see a kernel message about the link going down on one of my ports I won’t have to wonder which port has the interface name eth4.
I did idly consider naming the Ethernet devices after their service, in which case I could have given names such as adsl and voip (appending a digit is not required). Also as the names which are permitted are reasonably long I could have used names such as mb0-adsl, although a hyphen character might cause problems with some of the various utilities and boot scripts – I haven’t tested out which characters other than letters and digits work. I may use interface names such as adsl for systems that run at client sites, if a client phoned me to report Internet problems and messages on the console saying things like “adsl NIC Link is Down” then my process of diagnosing the problem would become a lot easier!
Does anyone else have any good ideas for how to rename interfaces to make things easier to manage?
I have filed Debian bug report #592607 against ppp requesting that it support renaming interfaces. I have also filed Debian bug report #592608 against my Portslave package requesting that provide such support – although it may be impossible for me to fix the bug against Portslave without fixing pppd first (I haven’t looked at the pppd code in question for a while). Thanks to Rusty for suggesting this feature during the Q/A part of my talk about Portslave for the Debian mini-conf in LCA 2002 [1].
Today I bought a box of fries from The Lord of the Fries [1]. I bought it from their new stand at Flinders St station because I was going past and saw no queue. In the past I had considered buying from their store on Elizabeth St but the queues were too long.
The fries were nice – probably among the best fries that I’ve had from local fish and chip shops. Way better than any other fries that you can find in the center of Melbourne. The range of sauces is quite good if you like that thing (I just like vinegar on mine). However it should be noted that the quantity of chips that you would get for the same price at a local fish and chip shop is usually a lot greater.
Overall I was a bit disappointed, sure it’s nice to have someone hand-cut fresh potatoes and to actually care about making a quality product. But when compared to the other options for relatively fast food in the CBD it didn’t seem that great to me. I’m never going to join a queue that has more than 20 people to buy them! But I probably will buy from them on occasion if they don’t have big queues.
It seems to me that the best thing that they have done is to create a strong commitment to food quality and document it on their web site. I hope that this will inspire other fast-food companies to do the same thing and result in an overall increase in the food quality.
On a related note Jamie Oliver has an IDEO project running with the aim of getting kids into fresh food [2].
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